What are characteristics of a pro bass amp? Is it features/power/marketing/reliability/quality of build/that guy has one? My Rumble has some good features and works great but is definitely mass produced.
If the thread already exists, sorry, I'm still pre coffee.
"Pro" amp IMHO refers to the quality of the amp and your ability to get the sound you want out of it. It also varies depending on the era you are playing. In the 60's my "Pro amp" was a 1966 Fender Bassman (50-watt rms, all tube amp) that I bought in 1966. Sounded great and certainly wasn't embarrassed to use it on-stage. It could do everything I needed it to do back in the 60's. It was widely considered a great amp. One step above that was the 85-watt Dual Showman.
Then in the early 70's I toured with a nightclub group playing 5-nights a week, 50-weeks a year for three years. My Bassman worked fine for the first few months until the keys and guitars upgraded their amps to the Vox Super Beatle amps and drowned me out. Then I bought a Standel "piggy-back" amp, an MCIIb/SAM30b. That amp was more than enough to bury anything anywhere. It was a great sounding amp for the time (215 cab, definitely "old school") and amazingly loud. Indoors I couldn't turn it above 3 (9 o'clock) on the dial and at outdoor festivals I could turn it up to 5 (12 o'clock). It was a boutique amp (small and limited production numbers) that was more than twice the price of my Bassman amp. But it was easily 4 times the amp.
So my Fender bassman was a "pro-amp" for a while. Then in the 70's where the acoustic 360/361 started to become the "standard", it was no longer a pro amp, but my Standel absolutely was. Then in 1976 our house was burglarized and all my "pro-gear" was stolen, including my '65 Jazz Bass. So now I had no amp and a young family with no money to buy another amp.
Wasn't until 1997 that I really started playing again, first at the Siskiyou Blues Society's weekly jam at Mt. Shasta City, CA on Wednesday nights and shortly after that playing gigs around the local towns with a Yamaha 115 combo, that definitely wasn't "pro-gear". But it worked as long as the rest of the group didn't get too loud. After that I bought a Sunn B202 cab (2x12) at a yard sale for $40. This was also a "has been" cab because it would be considered pro gear in the late 60's but since it would only handle 100-watts, you had to be careful with it. No worries, I just daisy chained that off the Yamaha combo and played that for a bit...this was NOT pro-gear but worked.
Next thing that happens is I get a little money set aside and opt for a GK Backline250 amp with a GK115bpx. I'd played through some GK gear for a very short amount of time in 97 and it sounded good, so I expected good things with this and planned to use my Sunn 212 with it too. Big mistake. That Backline 250 is 125-watts rms and has a minimum ohms load of 8 ohms. Further, the manual said to never plug a second amp into it. Good news is that my Sunn cab was a 4 ohm amp that had both parallel AND series outs on the backplate. In parallel that would put a 2.67 ohm load on the amp and melt things, but in series, the ohms are added together putting a 12 ohm load on it, which was fine.
So I plugged that Sunn into the amp and then used the series out to plug in the GK115bpx and that cobbled together system worked for a while. Dropped the watts to about 85-watts because of the higher impedance, but the two extra 12" speakers moved a lot more air. So it sounded better and louder overall...still not pro-gear.
I'd heard a lot about Eden at this point and ZZounds had a 30% off sale going putting an Eden Nemesis RS400 withing my reach in 2008. Grabbed it and now I had an amp that had "pro-sound". I was shocked and very pleasantly surprised at the improvement in my sound. But my cabs sucked.
Using that 400-watts @4 ohms amp farted out my Sunn cab way too easily. So I bought an acoustic B410 after playing a few gigs with the previous set up. Now I ran an acoustic B410 on top of the GK115bpx cab and drove it with my RS400 amp. Now I had good enough gear to play anywhere and have good sound...maybe not quite "pro-gear" yet. I still lusted after one of the Eden "Gold-face" amps (WT series), which are the best that Eden had to offer.
Just 2-years later I got an opportunity to buy a WT500 dual powerblock amp directly from the founder of Eden, David Nordschow. He sold Eden in 2008, left in 2009, and brought out his new DNA gear in 2010. So he was selling his amp that had lived on his cabinet testing bench. He used it to design the Eden cabs since 1999. He'd hot-rodded this amp from 250-watts per channel into 4 ohms and 500-watts bridged at 8ohms, up to the power system from the WT800A. So it was 400-watts per channel and 800-watts bridged. It's an amazing amp and he sold it and shipped it directly to me. It's still my main amp.
Since it is a dual powerblock amp, I plugged the 115 into one side and the 410 into the other and then used the balance knob to adjust the mix of sound between the two. That made a very significant difference in my sound because The 115 was so boomy with any previous amp that I had to drop the bass EQ down to 10 o'clock to clear up the mud, and my poor acoustic B410 needed that bass EQ. Now I could keep the bass EQ flat and just turn the magic knob (balance knob) to clean up the boom and mud. THAT amp is a "pro'" piece of gear.
Then in 2015 I finally returned to have a "pro set-up" when I bought my DNS-410 from DNA. Again, at $1,000 for the cab at the time, it wasn't cheap. But it easily replaced my previous bass stack with far better sound and far higher SPL. That is the absolute clearest most articulate 410 I've ever heard or played; it has a low and tight bottom end, and with my 800-watt amp, I could drive it to 134db. That is of course instant hearing damage.
I wouldn't be able to be anywhere near it at that level, but I could drive it that high. It will actually handle 1400-watts rms (both mechanically and thermally) and produces a maximum SPL of 137db. So I can use it anywhere and never need to bring along an 810. I get told to turn down at outdoor festivals if I turn my master more than a tiny smidge above 10 o'clock with my 800-watt amp. That cab is definitely "Pro-Gear".
So now, I'm back at the "Pro-Gear" level I had achieved in the early 70's. The defining sound of Pro-Gear has changed of course, but I'm there.
Now, don't be so apologetic about your Fender Rumble gear. Yes, they are mass produced, but they put a lot of value for the dollar into them. Fender has been around almost forever and they have always had a good reputation and good sound. A couple of caveats though. If you want to use a Rumble system to play a wide variety of venues, you need to get at least their Rumble 500. That will cover small and medium venues no problem. And you'll have a good sound. I like my sound better, but the Fender sound is good.
When you need to play large venues, you're going to need to buy one of their 210 cabinets to combine with the 210 that is in the Rumble 500 combo (that gives you a 410). Better yet, get the Fender Rumble 800-watt head, buy one 210 cab to begin with and then buy a 410 Rumble cab afterwards after raising some money playing gigs. Use the 210 cab for small to medium clubs and the 410 for large clubs. Add that first 210 onto it (giving you a 610) for outdoor festivals. Your gear will look good and sound good. No need for apologies about it.
Now I do consider a number of other brands as makers of "pro-gear". Mesa, Markbass, Aquilar, Ampeg (not my personal choice, but definitely pro), GK (be careful which series you get - they have some crap), and certainly more that don't spring to the top of my head. My personal choice is both DNA and Eden. The key to "pro-gear" is, "Can you get 'your sound' out of it" and "Can it handle the size of venues you will be playing?" IMHO, if you can answer yes to both of those questions, you've got pro gear. And of course, pro-gear needs to be reliable too, or it's not pro-gear.
